


our native land draws all of us

by SerenePanic



Series: VLD Angst Week 2017 [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-18
Updated: 2017-03-18
Packaged: 2018-10-06 23:51:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10347435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SerenePanic/pseuds/SerenePanic
Summary: Coran is many things: advisor, mechanic, historian.Once, he was a father.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Ovid's "The Poems of Exile: Tristia and the Black Sea Letters".
> 
> Part of V:LD Angst Week.
> 
> March 18th: Homesickness.

Coran will never admit it, but he misses Altea with every breath. He misses the flowers, and the mountains, and the deadly acid-glass rain. He misses the skies, and the people, and the food, and the laughter, and the traditions.

But more than that—more than his home, or the mountains, or the wild ecosystem with all its familiar dangers—he misses his family. His grandfather, who told the wildest stories about collecting scaultrite and building the Castle of Lions; his parents, who ran a little café together in the base of a mountain—he misses them dearly.

He misses his siblings—his twin sister Mira and her serious, deadpan sense of humor; his younger brother Declan and his love of all the stinkiest, slimiest bugs known to the universe; all the little ones—Lara and Lana and Emmet and Francis and Lina, the horde of younger ones who were all grown up and lost by the time Altea was destroyed—Mira and Lara and Emmet to a medical convoy that had been taken out, Francis to illness, Declan to the army, and Lina (little Lina, the youngest of them all, barely an adult when she died) to Zarkon’s prison camps.

(Sometimes, when he’s having a really bad day, he lets himself miss Jaf. He lets himself forget, for a minute, that in the end Jaf sided with Zarkon, that he betrayed them all. He lets himself remember the brother who taught him how to whistle, and took him out scaultrite gathering. He lets himself remember the brother he lost before any of the others, before they knew what would become of Altea. Sometimes, he lets himself remember his older brother, but only for a moment.)

Some days, he doesn’t know how he does it. The loss of his siblings, the ones he grew up with and depended on, who taught him patience and understanding, sits like a heavy weight on his chest, reminding him each day anew that he is the only one left.

The worst ache, though, is the ache left by the loss of his children. Alteans live long lives, generally, but even then it’s rare for a parent to outlive their children, and here Coran is, where both of them are not. He tries not to think about them, too much, because he has no idea how to handle this all-encompassing grief and permanent separation. He tries to put them out of mind, but that’s harder than he’d expected, because he sees them in the way Lance teases Pidge, in the way Hunk supports and listens to anyone who wants to talk, in the way Keith watches them and feels like an outsider.

What he wouldn’t give for them back! Aria and Theo, the twins, wreaking havoc in the Castle wherever they went, determined to give Coran a heart attack before they reached adulthood (all he wishes now is that they had reached it).

Coran hears the paladins toss around old Earth proverbs, and the one that hurts the most is _home is where the heart is_.

His heart was the twins, and they’re gone.

He tries not to think about them, but it’s nearly impossible—Lance is so like Theo, with his humor and the way he tries to hide how inadequate he feels, how much he tries to give his entirety to the ones he cares about, how he depends on knowing there’s someone there to support him.

Coran hates to even think it, but secretly he’s so glad that no one on the ship is quite like Aria. Keith is almost similar, with his emotional distance—but Aria was reserved because they wanted to be, and Keith is reserved because he feels distant, and doesn’t know how to be closer. Aria could, if they wanted—but people made them uncomfortable, and it was more comfortable to watch until something happened that required their direct intervention.

(Usually, it meant Theo had gotten himself into trouble.)

Coran shoves it down. He compartmentalizes. He pretends he doesn’t mourn them with every breath. He lies to himself and to Allura, when her questioning eyes soften and she glances at him, worried. He tries not to think about them at all, but it’s so much harder than he’d ever bargained for.

He lets himself think that it’s okay that he doesn’t know how they died.

(He doesn’t know if it would be better if he did know what had happened to them—they were off planet when Altea was destroyed, not quite adults yet, but old enough to help with the escape efforts, but it’s been ten thousand years, and any record of what happened to them after is long gone.)

He knows Allura is grieving too, and he does his best to hide his grief and sorrow, to be strong for the princess. He stands by her, and listens when she misses her home—she’s so young. Somehow, in the height of the war, Coran had never quite realized how young she really was. She was older than Lina had been, unquestionably an adult, but still a _young_ one. She should still have been sitting at her father’s side, learning how to rule.

Coran feels impossibly old.

He just…he just wants to go home.

He’s so tired, and he misses Altea. Even with the war, even after Zarkon betrayed them—it was a difficult time, but he had his _family_ then. Now, it’s just him, Allura, and the five paladins, and while they are a family of a sort, it’s not the same.

(Well—he sees Theo in Lance, and he knows that he, almost unconsciously, emotionally adopted the boy as his own, too. It helps, a little—if Coran concentrates on helping Lance, he can almost forget that he failed Theo, failed Aria, and broke his promises to the both of them that he’d made when they came to live with him, that he wouldn’t leave them—)

No matter. The universe is at war, and the Galra _must_ be stopped, and to do that they need Voltron, and he needs to pull himself together and advise these children who were thrown into a war they never asked for.

He can grieve later.


End file.
